Switching hands could help control overeating: Study

If you can't help yourself from overindulging on snacks in certain settings — watching TV or at the movies — you might want to consider putting the food on your other side.

A new study from psychologists at the University of Southern California shows how subtle changes in circumstance, such as changing the hand you eat with, can result in more moderate levels of consumption, particularly if you're not even enjoying the food you're eating.

In a few different experiments, the researchers tested people's tendency to eat popcorn, even when it's stale.

In one example, people who were about the enter a movie theatre to watch film trailers — told they were there for assessing connections between personality and movie preferences — were given either fresh or week-old popcorn. It was found that those who indicated afterward they don't usually eat popcorn during movies ate far less when given the stale popcorn.

Those identified as regular popcorn munchers during movies were found to eat as much popcorn in these trials whether it was old or fresh, indicating how important habit can be when it comes to how much we consume.

"When we've repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present," David Neal, the study's lead author, said in a statement.

In another version of this test, a variable was added of telling subjects to use their dominant or non-dominant hand for eating.

Those who were using their non-dominant hands — even those who had popcorn regularly when watching movies — ate less when given stale popcorn.

"It's not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the environments in which they typically overeat," said Wendy Wood, a co-author of the study, which was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters to actively disrupt the established patterns of how they eat through simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat."

But setting was also shown to be important. When the experiment was replicated for people watching movie clips in a board room rather than in a theatre, even those that regularly eat popcorn at the movies were less inclined to gobble up the stale popcorn.

"The results show just how powerful our environment can be in triggering unhealthy behaviour," Neal said. "Sometimes will power and good intentions are not enough, and we need to trick our brains by controlling the environment instead."

Janet Polivy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, said past research has shown habit plays a significant role in excessive consumption. However, she added that there are other factors, such as the fact that people are drawn into the pure enjoyment of certain foods, independent of setting and situation.

In an email, Polivy said that "people eat palatable food whether they are hungry or not — hence the popularity of dessert, which we eat after a full meal despite not being at all hungry anymore. So pure enjoyment is probably as important a factor as habit or setting, and all contribute to eating."

Caroline Davis, a health science professor at York University in Toronto, said addictions to food and drugs tend to be based on many things, including situational factors and the specific substance the person is craving.

"(Overeating is) such a complex behaviour that we know all kinds of other things contribute," she said. "I subscribe to the idea that, for particularly palatable foods like sugar and fat and highly processed foods, we have the potential to become physiologically dependent on them the same way people can become physiologically dependent on other substances."

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